Attached Link: http://www.gmaxsupport.com/html/faq.asp

I have been coming to an interesting conclusion that a LOT of background and scenery renders could be done with 3D GAME software...

If you have Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2004 and go out and download the TONS of incredibly good scenery and rendering enhancements, you can have stunningly realistic skies, water and landscapes as you zoom around in your stunningly realistic aircraft.

I have already experimented with substituting this scenery for Bryce, Vue and even Terragen scenery (just experiments- no commercial projects) and the look is incredibly good.
Best of all, the scenery is nearly INSTANTLY accessable from
any camera angle and render time is as fast as pushing your
print screen button.

Since you can already use GMAX (MAX-lite) to import OBJ's,
including a free script apparently written by DAZ, it would seem that rendering POSER or DAZ files in your favorite 3D Game engine would be a real option.

Throw in a 64 bit machine and high-end graphics card and you can even have HUGE screen renders- as large as your card-monitor can support. INTERESTING!

Message edited on: 07/03/2004 19:03

Attached Link: http://orbiter.dansteph.com/

Also really interesting is the FREEWARE Orbiter software program- originally designed to be a Space Simulator for NASA Shuttle flights, it has been expanded by add-ons to support all kinds of spacecraft, planets, space stations, etc. The renders in Orbiter also also extremely good when you download the add-on packs. It would seem that by importing your favorite POSER or DAZ Sci-Fi models you could actually fly them around and control them in REAL TIME! Wouldn't THAT be fun?

You'd be surprised how many people have used Quake and Unreal screenshots for backgrounds.

Some of the people creating maps for these games are true artists.

Attached Link: http://media.pc.ign.com/media/664/664548/imgs_1.html

Right, L.D., --I think the REAL 3D artists are probably working for upcoming 3D games. Check out this new one called "Midway"- (won't be out until next year) -- --these sample screens rival anything I've seen done in Bryce or Vue-- yet these are REAL TIME 3D sequences fully controllable by single or multi-players. Look how great the clouds look! And the water effects are amazingly good considering you are looking at REAL TIME water EFX. Seems we are getting closer to the MAKE ART BUTTON (just "print screen")...

BTW- if you see a BLANK screen, just look at the top right button and click on it to see the preview screens...

Havent there been music videos made with game engines? So why not? The trick is to have the game producer make the game "mod"able. If they do this.....(and most do....) :)

GMAX is the only software that I know of currently that allows you to import OBJ, 3DS. etc as well as FlightSim, TrainSim and Quake formats and then export them back into those games.(There is NO export back to 3DS, OBJ, etc. as they DON'T want you to do that.) What makes all this really work in the latest games is DirectX 9... a LOT of new real-time rendering effects are possible. It would seem that a rendering software that would be "Game Ready" could be the NEXT BIG THING. (GMAX doesn't support rendering, and games can only "render" as big as your monitor-graphics card allows) but a hi-rez DirectX 9 rendering engine would seem to be a potentially HUGE hit, I would think. Not as good as Ray-Tracing, etc. but the MASS MARKET wouldn't care, as it would be nearly INSTANT- no waiting! (And it would look better than the current OpenGL render- which isn't bad, but not great.)

,,

BTW- I had thought of a way to get GMAX files OUT of GMAX, and, sure enough, a guy over at TurboSquid's GMAX Forum posted a thread stating the same method-(which he says DOES work): 1. Get the Tempest (QUAKE) game pack so you can export .md3 files. 2. Get 3D Exploration and IMPORT the *.md3- and then EXPORT it out as 3DS, OBJ, etc.

Attached Link: http://www.dsmith.gmaxsupport.com/Essential_Tools.htm

Here's a truely EXCELLENT site for getting what you need for GMAX- including .MD2 and .MD3 Tempest/Quake Exporters and a great 3D Exploration tutorial on converting the files for other 3D apps...

very interesting stuff

About the time UT 2004 came out I started thinking about this. I mean the particle effects look as good as pre rendered ones. Then I got Farcry... OMG! That game is so breathtaking to look at. I think someone will eventually see the promise of a Hybrid Realtime/render based system for producing animations and stills in a 3d app.

Message edited on: 07/04/2004 10:27

Message edited on: 07/04/2004 10:32

Attached Link: http://www.areteis.com/products/gameware/overview.htm

One big advantage of getting 3D models into Game Scenes is that many of the latest games use state-of-the-art technologies that would cost, at minimum, hundreds of bucks, like Arete's realistic ocean water EFX. You can see these effects in "Enigna-Rising Tide" and others soon to be coming out... "Digital GameWare API is a physics-driven middleware solution for game developers that enables simulation and rendering of ocean environment FX at real-time frame rates. Digital GameWare API is the newest addition to AretEntertainments award-winning Digital NatureToolsTM and Digital PyroToolsTM product lines, which have been used to generate FX for feature films such as Cast Away, Pearl Harbor, and Titanic. The Digital GameWare API C++ API features a simple-to-use collection of FX objects that can be easily integrated into any game engine."

It's worth mentioning in tis thread that exporting your Poser models out for use in a game violates copyright law and the Eulas for Poser itself and most of your purchases (notably anything from DAZ). None of this is actually new news -- Ultimate Unwrap can take a great many game formats and standard 3d formats and export back out to pretty much any of them as well. Neither point is meant to take away from the enthusiasm, btw. Veritas brings out the point that what would thrill most people is the immediacy of the imagery -- they wouldn't care that it doesn't look quite as good as the stuff rendered by higher end apps -- all of which are being written anew to take advantage of the 64 bit architecture that has now arrived...

Yes, ynsaen, that's my main thinking about this- As DAZ's Cyclorama and other Photo-Props have become increasingly popular-(and they even encourage use of "clip-art") it seems to me that the NEXT logical big trend will be INSTANT Renders using technology like DX 9 (etc.) I started out doing all the tedious 3D stuff many years ago with West End Film and Crystal Graphics (on DOS, ran on Targa boards-Circa 1985) and then later through Bryce 1, Poser 2, Vue 2, etc. But the trend now, because of the influence of ultra high quality 3D games and the Mass Market appeal of instant gratification- I think 3D rendering's next phase has to be INSTANT rendering. Frankly, I've seen many renders over at the 3DMAX and Lightwave forums that look like total crap, even though these people all claim to have $2000-$5000 worth of software- they still don't know what the hell they are doing with it- same for many Bryce, Vue users, etc. What most people really want are FAST results and not rocket science. Whoever comes out with a 3D GAME style INSTANT rendering software will sell MILLIONS of copies! Poser, DAZ, etc better take note- I think their technologies are going to be increasingly NARROW, NICHE market renders and their market base will rapidly shrink when all this new 64 bit stuff really hits the FAN next year...

BTW- Microsoft will be releasing a 64 bit operating system THIS year. Add to that a new release of DirectX 10 supporting all kinds of new 3D render EFX, and the marketplace for an INSTANT 3D Render program is THERE!!!

.... I'll believe it when I see it. There is a =lot= of man hours going into game content creation. That is still the single most labor intensive aspect of game design and creation. UT 2004 is beautiful...as is Unreal 2. And the bar goes higher when Half Life 2 and Doom 3 hit this August. But that doesn't alter the fact that a lot of work goes into the eye candy....and there in exactly -no- commonality between game engines. All of them use propietary file formats, and custom written plugins for the major software packages. To this day there are still occlusion tricks and Z buffer filtering to narrow the actually active area and allow more resources for the game to move more in that area. Particle and lighting effects are real time now only because graphic cards have essentially become small computers themselves, dedicated to handling just those things (to get the snazzy water effects you can see in Morrowind, for instance, you have to have a GF-3 card that supports both pixel and vertex shaders). XP-64 has promise....eventually. There is a dearth of even beta drivers out there, rendering the beta of the OS next to useless (and that assumes that there will be a 64 bit Direct X release....something that I haven't seen confirmed). Poser would actually benefit from a recompile into 64 bitness...the extra memory bandwidth would make things smoother, and really open the window to large renders. The same for Vue, Bryce, etc. The porting to 64 bit has been reported to be comparatively easy (so far). Like you said; most people don't know what they are doing with the apps they have. All this instant gratification system would do is produce the same drek in greater quantities. Speed can not replace talent...no matter how many monkey bang on those typewriters.

"...NEXT logical big trend will be INSTANT Renders using technology like DX 9..." Um, second through fourth words involve an oxymoron. Trends are not logical. They are a socioemotional response to common environmental factors. Trends also have a backlash factor. Also, The game engines are not instant renders. They are displays that more or less require motion, and that motion is already fairly well predetermined by the game engine itself. I've seen a lot of really pretty game shots of late, and very few of them are actual game play screen caps -- they are stills rendered using a software renderer or caps from a film sequence created using a software renderer. For stills -- the bulk of what you see done around here, lol -- these engines don't have the capability to produce the level of clarity you see unless the back end elements are created and assembled by someone with skill and knowledge -- so what you end up with is a lot of stuff that will look far worse than even some of the really bad artwork here. That's not gonna generate a trend that "Poser, DAZ, etc better take note- I think their technologies are going to be increasingly NARROW, NICHE market renders and their market base will rapidly shrink when all this new 64 bit stuff really hits the FAN next year... " would apply to. Lastly, as briefly noted by Dale_B, these things are also going to require something that is NOT and advantage and comprises an increasingly small niche market itself: high end video cards. THe overwhelming majority of folks using computers today do not have video subsystems capable of displaying all the fancy tricks and beautiful elements, and the greatest number of users don't know how to properly code the mathematical formulas that produce this stuff -- nor is is something that can easily be changed to a parametric system for use in a gui. and, lastly, you do forget something very interesting as well: Designer Ego. the folks that design these engines are proud of them, and very protective of them. Don't look for them to shift any of this to this realm anytime soon.

Hi. Just my two cents: A 64-Bit OS won't speed up things very much. The only real advantage is that the OS in capable of using more then four Gigabytes of RAM in one chunk, so databases will become faster, other apps typically not. About DirectX-Rendering SW - before you sing the praise for the graphic adapters keep in Mind that all you make hat to fit into the memory of the graphics Adapter to do it's magic. Keep in mind how big our high-realistic textures are. Keep in mind how big our meshes are. It surely is impressive what modern adapters can do. But the limits simply are somewhere else. Greetings, Uwe

Not sure about the 64-bit issue, but definitely as PC's get faster, the programs will evolve or die. I agree with LD, I've recently started working with the Unreal Tournament editing toolkit, and its capabilities are mind-blowing. On top of the graphic functions, there are amazing sound capability, including surround sound (I'm an audio guy, and this is my primary function on one of my freelance client's game). Using UnrealEd led me to experiment with Machinima (the process of creating movies with games and game engines). It's amazing what you can do, easily. I haven't actually done anything useful for my own projects with it yet, but I will definitely be using it to supplement those projects in the future right alongside Poser and Bryce.